Bell city manager quoted ‘Sopranos,’ loves horses and power

We know the story of Bell and the outrageous $787,000-a-year salary of city official Robert Rizzo. What we don’t know is Rizzo’s background. Who is he, exactly? And how did this Bay Area native go from UC Berkeley and Cal State Hayward grad to the most vilified city manager in the country?

The LA Times, which broke the story on Bell, attempts to answer these questions in a fascinating profile about the big man behind the larger-than-life income.

What the newspaper found was a guy who blamed his personal woes (a divorce from his first wife and a 150-pound weight gain) on his Bell job. And even now, after exhaustive media coverage of the salary scandal and backlash from the public, Rizzo is justifying the money he made, pointing out the time he has worked for Bell:

“Yeah, the money went bad. But when you think about it, the 17 years I had been there, that’s $250,000 a year.”

The Times also discovered two sides of Rizzo. On the one hand, the official who ran the small poor SoCal town of Bell, but lives in a huge house in Huntington Beach (pic) and owns a 10-acre ranch in Washington (pic), is described as a wallflower. He also liked power, “took to quoting tough-guy lines from ‘The Sopranos,’ and tolerated no challenges to his expanding authority at City Hall, Bell insiders say.”

At the same time, the “other” Rizzo, the one people know through his thoroughbred racing business, is “fatherly,” a horse lover and a family guy. His gargantuan income apparently wasn’t enough to cover fees at stables in SoCal, so he raced his horses in Emerald Downs in Washington and Golden Gate Fields in Berkeley, according to the Times.

To read more about Rizzo, his career as a civil servant and his personal life, go to the LA Times.